Student Services Blog

SAFS Professor Tom Quinn is featured in UW Today:
‘It’s no secret that human activities affect fish, particularly those that must migrate to reproduce. Years of building dams and polluting rivers in some regions have left fish such as salmon struggling to return to their home streams and give birth to the next generation.
A new University of Washington study points to yet another human factor that is hampering the ability of fish to reproduce: the timing of our fishing seasons.

SAFS faculty Tom Quinn and Ray Hilborn are featured on CNN Politics:
‘This is the most valuable wild salmon fishery in the world
Under the Trump administration, it could become a mine.

This year, 56 million sockeye salmon swam hundreds of miles from the ocean toward the rivers and streams of the Bristol Bay watershed in southwest Alaska.

Many that escaped fishermen and bears leapt over waterfalls and used a mysterious combination of the Earth’s magnetic field and their own sensory memories to locate the exact streams where they were born — and then spawned, made gravel nests for their young, and died.

SAFS postdoc Sean Anderson is featured in UW Today:
‘For people who make a living by harvesting natural resources, income volatility is a persistent threat. Crops could fail. Fisheries could collapse. Forests could burn. These and other factors — including changing management regulations and practices — can lower harvests, which depresses income for farmers, fishers and timber harvesters. But the ways that these forces interact to impact income have been difficult to track, especially at the level of the individual worker.

SAFS postdoc Lewis Barnett and professors Trevor Branch and Tim Essington are featured in UW Today:
‘Like old-growth trees in a forest, old fish in the ocean play important roles in the diversity and stability of marine ecosystems. Critically, the longer a fish is allowed to live, the more likely it is to successfully reproduce over the course of its lifetime, which is particularly important in variable environmental conditions.

SAFS professor Julian Olden and postdoctoral researcher Lise Comte are featured in UW Today:
‘Climate change will force many amphibians, mammals and birds to move to cooler areas outside their normal ranges, provided they can find space and a clear trajectory among our urban developments and growing cities.
But what are the chances for fish to survive as climate change continues to warm waters around the world?

SAFS grad student James Dimond is featured on UPI Science News:
‘Marine biologist Ruth Gates sat down in an oversize wooden rocking chair at an oceanside resort here last week to talk about the next frontier in coral science and a new hope for saving coral reefs reeling from climate change: genetic technology.
“There are hundreds of species of coral, all with complex biologies and physiological traits that vary based on their DNA and environment,” Gates, director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, said while seated on a sprawling lanai overlooking acres of coral reefs awash in turquoise waters.

SAFS professors Luke Tornabene and Adam Summers are featured in UW Today:
‘A $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant will daylight thousands of specimens from their museum shelves by CT scanning 20,000 vertebrates and making these data-rich, 3-D images available online to researchers, educators, students and the public.
The project oVert, short for openVertebrate, complements other NSF-sponsored museum digitization efforts, such as iDigBio, by adding a crucial component that has been difficult to capture — the internal anatomy of specimens.

SAFS professor Luke Tornabene is profiled in the Whole U’s Faculty Friday:
‘Luke Tornabene hovers above the abyss, suspended somewhere between fathomless darkness and daylight, 800 feet above. A layer of condensation has formed on the interior of the five-person submersible—the product of warm air within the cockpit interacting with increasingly cold water without as the research vessel slips ever deeper into the dusk-colored Caribbean waters somewhere off the coast of Curacao.

Nothing on the internet shocks me anymore. But seeing a fully-formed mole inside a fish’s mouth made me think, “Hmmm, yeah. I guess that’s kind of gross.”…
“Largemouth bass [like the one Mackinney caught] are particularly well-known for eating small mammals of various types.

SAFS graduate student Eleni Petrou is featured in UW Today:
‘In 2015, a harmful algal bloom damaged ecosystems, communities and economies across the U.S. West Coast. Fisheries essential to local economies faced long-term closures to protect human health. Marine life suffered mass die-offs. Climate change makes recurrent events likely, but there is little assurance that public policy will better support our communities and environment the next time.